Models are amazing. And they’re really necessary if you’re going to excel in Analytics. Consider the model below. It’s how I think as a marketer and a marketing scientist: I have one major goal this quarter. It’s the # of Qualified Leads. This is my optimization objective. It doesn’t have to be yours. Your will vary. However, for this quarter, I’m all about the # of Qualified Leads. I get qualified leads when people complete goals on the site. And I get people to the site from Paid and Earned sources. And the two primary levers I have to pull are paid budget and owned budget. Let’s unpack. There are channels that are owned and channels that are paid. If[…]
Category: Analytics
Andrew Cherwenka and I soft launched our startup, Authintic, last week. Authintic is an analytics technology company enabling permission marketing. Andrew wrote a much more detailed piece for the Huffington Post on the topic. It’s worth a read. He’s very eloquent and accessible. I have nothing contradictory to add. Nothing really controversial to say. Being at the confluence of three mega-trends is where I’m comfortable. The first is privacy in marketing. The FTC and the EU have made their opinions known. There’s this big fear out there that consumers won’t opt-in. Why the fear? Is anybody doing anything wrong? Common’ people – let’s treat people with respect. The second are advancements in machine learning and processing power. There are more[…]
This series originally appeared in Eyes on Analytics on April 16, 2012 The City of Edmonton posted a pretty interesting position last month. The description is so good that it bears repeating in this space. Bolding is my emphasis. Traffic Safety Predictive Analyst Put your superior analytical skills to work in North America’s first and only municipal Office of Traffic Safety. You will be joining the rapidly growing field of urban traffic safety where the application of statistics and predictive analysis is becoming a vital decision support tool in reducing motor vehicle collisions. Your responsibilities will be: Provide short, medium, and long-term predictions of collisions and/or speeding by considering current and historical traffic safety related data as well as other[…]
With few exceptions, everybody has a personal knowledge system. I use the term as Roger Martin meant it in “The Opposable Mind” (pp. 103). It’s all summed up in one nice little diagram. Behold: The text summary is: Your stance, “Who am I in the word and what am I trying to accomplish”, guides what tools you use. That is, “With what tools and models do I organize my thinking and understand the world?”, often guides experiences: “With what experiences can I build my repertoire of sensitivities and skills?”. Likewise, your experiences inform your tools which inform your stance. Tools I’ve railed against definition by tools. Again. Again. And Again. You are more than the sum of the tools and[…]
Post frequency on the analytics focused blog, Eyes on Analytics has increased to daily. In part, this is to solidify the understanding of the frequency-reach curve in blogging, and in part, it’s an attempt to understand where the broader market is at. I’m testing three themes: How to fight nature’s pesky way of inhibiting our ability to make clean causal statements. The importance of imagination in identifying independent variables. The role of evidence in decision making. Simplification of a message is not pandering. However, many pandering statements are deliberate simplifications. If your optimization objective is to gain followers: Post often. Post simply. Post what people want to hear. I’m choosing simplification while avoiding pandering. Let’s see how that unfolds over[…]
Sometimes the components of a marketing channel will not add up to equal the total performance of the marketing channel. This is caused by any number of realities and limitations imposed in part by nature, and, in part, by you, the marketer. Consider the following deliberately simple scenario: March 2012 Impressions: Total Digital Impressions Delivered: 100,000,000 Total Impressions with Chicken Creative: 25,000,000 Total Impressions with Beef Creative: 50,000,000 Total Impressions with Pork Creative: 75,000,000 Something doesn’t make sense. I’m telling you that 100,000,000 impressions were delivered in total, but each component of that figure: 25 million, 50 million, and 75 million, don’t actually add up. That’s because creative can have multiple attributes. An ad may feature Chicken alone, Beef alone,[…]
So who keeps on downvoting you on Reddit? We’ll find out. But first – three notes: You may be familiar with Reddit. If you’re not – you can read this explanation about what Reddit is. To answer that question, I downloaded a dataset that was built in early 2011 or very late 2010. The dataset is a 29MB gzip compressed and contains 7,405,561 votes from 31,927 users over 2,046,401 links. You can read about the methodology here. The file contains three columns – a vote, a userid, and a link. Only people who had their privacy settings set to open had that data read by an API. There is no meta-data about who these people are in real life (IRL)[…]
You may have read something about the Samsung 7500 and 8000 series televisions, the ones with a camera installed in them, over the past few days. The tl;dr summary: “For Samsung’s 7500 and 8000 series TVs, all you have to do is say “Hi, TV,” when you walk into a room for the TV to turn on and know who’s there.” “Think of it: The tech means an advertiser or TV programmer could, for the first time, know which members of a Nielsen household are watching a show or an ad. Cisco has even developed a system meant to read facial expressions and determine whether you’re entertained or bored.” “Many people in the living room are multitasking with other devices.[…]
Web Analytics Wednesday is tonight at The Wellington, in downtown Toronto’s analytics alley. It’s generously supported by AT Internet. There are some 40 people – representing among the best of the best, who will be in attendance. It’s a great opportunity for web analysts, social analysts, marketing scientists, data scientists, hackers, developers, and usability professionals to come out and talk about the great ideas and opportunities we have going on in Toronto. It’s also the first get together after eMetrics New York, which was a major, and had big time Canadian attendance. These tend to be among the more interesting evenings. It has also been some three months since the last WAWTO event, so there should be quite a few[…]
I’ll be at eMetrics next week. I hope you will be too. It’ll be great to be back in New York. There are a few people that I’m looking forward to seeing: John Lovett on social media, Melinda Driscoll on web analytics, Shari Cleary on media, Joseph Stanhope on mobile, Alex Langshur on government. And then there’s Michael Healy, Patrick Glinski, and me. I’m presenting with Michael Healy on sentiment. Michael Healy is among the best thinkers in this space and is just great. There have been a few very recent breakthroughs in sentiment analysis over the summer (and as recently as last week), and I’m looking forward to explaining how to treat the measure. I understand a core problem[…]